What Is Affective Touch?

The sensory experience of touch provides a unique contribution to the formation and maintenance of social bonding, promoting affiliative, collaborative and sexual behaviour (Suvilehto et al., 2015). Similarly, interpersonal touch plays a crucial role in social communication, with gentle slow touch conveying social support. The beneficial effects of touch can be traced back to early life, where maternal touch has been found to shape the developing “social brain” of an infant (Brauer et al., 2016), and continue to be important throughout the lifespan.

Yet not all touch is the same. Research has shown that we have a specialised neurophysiological system that mediates the affective, rather than the discriminative properties of touch (Olausson et al. 2002; McGlone et al. 2007). This system, so called CT-afferent system, is tuned to comforting caress-like interpersonal touch (i.e. affective touch; Olausson et al. 2010).

Characteristics of the CT afferent fibers – core of the affective touch system: